“Oh,” Malone said.
“Maybe they aren’t mistakes,” Fred said. “Maybe the technicians are deliberately feeding the machine with wrong answers.”
Malone hated to admit it, even to himself, but that answer sounded a lot more probable. Machine technicians weren’t exactly picked off the streets at random; they were highly trained for their work, and the idea of a whole crew of them starting to fumble at once, in a big way, was a little hard to swallow.
The idea of all of them sabotaging the machines they worked on, Malone thought, was a tough one to take, too. But it had the advantage of making some sense. People, he told himself dully, will do nutty things deliberately. It’s harder to think of them doing the same nutty things without knowing it.
“Well,” he said at last, “however it turns out, we’ll get to the bottom of it. Frankly, I think it’s being done on purpose.”
“So do I,” Fred said. “And when you find out just who’s making the technicians do such things—when you find out who gives them their orders—you let me know.”
“Let you know?” Malone said. “But—”
“Any man who would give false data to a perfectly innocent computer,” Fred said savagely, “would—would—” For a second he was apparently lost for comparisons. Then he finished: “Would kill his own mother.” He paused a second and added, in an even more savage voice, “And then lie about it!”
The image on the screen snapped off, and Malone sat back in his chair and sighed. He spent a few minutes regretting that he hadn’t chosen, early in life, to be a missionary to the Fiji Islands, or possibly simply a drunken bum without any troubles, but then the report Mitchell had mentioned arrived. Malone picked it up without much eagerness, and began going through it carefully.
It was beautifully typed and arranged; somebody on Mitchell’s team had obviously been up all night at the job. Malone admired the work, without being able to get enthusiastic about the contents. Like all technical reports, it tended to be boring and just a trifle obscure to someone who wasn’t completely familiar with the field involved. Malone and cybernetics were not exactly bosom buddies, and by the time he finished reading through the report he was suffering from an extreme case of ennui.